Choose one. Scan the titles, stop at the first one that grabs you and click. Don’t second-guess yourself.
Read the article. As you read, look for some detail or phrase or idea that strikes you.
Write your story. Don’t try to retell the story as it was told in the article. Focus on the idea or detail that caught your imagination. Turn that into a story.
GO!
What Now?
Today is a particularly important day…you’ve spent the past month focusing on your writing and your life as a writer.
I couldn’t be more proud of you!
I encourage you to download the post-challenge worksheet attached to this page and either print it out or simply use the question and answer them in your journal.
What worked?
What was a sure-fire way to torpedo your writing day?
What surprised you?
WRITE IT ALL DOWN
While you’re in the throes of the challenge it’s easy to think you’ll never forget all the lessons you’re learning.
You will.
So save the lessons, put them somewhere safe, then take the rest of the day off. Maybe tomorrow too. You deserve it.
Celebrate Your Success
And don’t forget to download your Certificate of Completion. Print it out, fill in your name, and post a picture of yourself on social media with the hashtag #StoryADayMay
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Special thanks to all the writers who provided such brilliant and inspiring prompts for our 10th anniversary. Do consider going back to your favorite prompt and buying a copy of one fo the authors’ books, and leaving them a review (the ultimate ‘thank you’!)
Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!
Today it’s another post from the archives, one of my favourites. And this time you get a peek into the kind of content the Superstars group gets throughout the challenge– perhaps you’ll be able to join us next time!
The Prompt
Write A Story As A Series of Letters/Tweets/Memos
Julie’s Notes
If you’ve been coming here for a while, you’re going to recognize this. It’s one of my favorites.
It is a challenge to you to write a story in a letter, a series of letters, a series of tweets, some sort of epistolary story. Maybe you get replies from different people. You can have found objects, documents, all of which add it add up to a story.
Now, if you really get into this, you might not finish this today. It might become a bigger project, or you may do what somebody, the first year that we, we did story a day and write a series of tweets that got progressively creepier and creepier as this person was calling for help via Twitter, which back in 2010 was pretty revolutionary.
It could be on both sides of the conversation.
It could have multiple voices.
It could have a single voice where we have to really try and figure out what’s going on.
There’s a story I often cite by Neil Gaiman called “Orange”, which is simply a series of answers to a police interrogation by a teenage girl. We don’t hear the questions, we just get her answers. And it starts off fairly mundane. And of course, being Neil Gaiman, it gets a little strange.
There’s something about the direct voice in letter writing or journal writing or in that kind of “direct to camera” conversation that really allows us to get inside a character’s head and get very emotionally involved in the story.
So that’s your prompt for today, and this is just a quick little prompt, a quick little video to give you that. I hope you’re still writing.
E is for Engage
Throughout this month I’ve talked about the WRITER Code, my framework for building a writing life you can love. In Week 1 we focused on Write; Week 2 was about Refining your process; Week 3 brought you prompts designed to Improve parts of your writing craft. Last week we focused on Triumph – celebrating every little success, every day. This week is all about Engaging with the wider writing community.
We’ve got this weekend left to go and then we will be out of here, as far as the challenge goes. So what comes next?
Accountability is really important along with building the behaviors into your routine that encourage you to be successful. It’s not something I’m trying to invent. This is something that successful people do. They prioritize the thing that’s important to them.
They create the habits that will support that
They commit to it on paper
They commit to it in front of other people.
There are concrete actions you can take to reinforce your commitment to help you avoid the willpower drain, help you not make excuses, help you build the habits into your life to support the goals, and support the things that really matter to you. I’m going to be talking a lot about behavior over the next few months and trying to really find ways to help us all knuckle down to our writing.
It’s such a self confidence thing, with writing. It’s not like working out. You just get up and drag yourself to the gym at six and you’re done. For writers, we need to drag ourselves to the gym, build the equipment from a few scraps lying around, and then invent the exercises too!
Inventing worlds is a huge endeavor. I[t’s very easy to walk away from it and say, I’m too tired. I’m too crap, I’m not good enough.
All of these, these things that we can put in our own way.
I’m going to be working to come up with some ways to help us all build habits and accountability into our writing lives. I hope you’ll stick around StoryADay in the coming months to share in that.
So quick prompt, long ramble. Sorry about that!
Write me a series of letters, and most of all keep writing.
What did you write today and how are you engaging with the wider writing community?
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!
Today I dug into the StoryADay archives for a favorite prompt and came up with this one. Those of you who’ve been around for a while may remember it, but I’m betting whatever you come up with for it this year will be COMPLETELY different from how you used it last time.
A TV critic took issue with the latest episodes of the BBC’s Sherlock, complaining that our hero was more James Bond than Conan Doyle’s Holmes. The episode’s writer wrote a response in verse, then the critic wrote back with his own poem. BUT, in the last couple of lines of the poem, he pointed out that he had embedded a hidden message in his words (the second letter of the first word of every line spelled it out).
I was so tickled that I’m stealing the idea (which he stole from Conan Doyle, so I don’t feel bad).
THE PROMPT
Write a story with a hidden message
TIPS
You could make the first letter of every sentence spell out a message.
You could make the first/second/third/last word of every sentence add up to a secret message.
You should probably start by writing out your secret message and then figuring out the rest of the words in your story, so it fits!
This will force you to break all the normal rules of your process of storytelling. Don’t be afraid. Be bold. At the very least you’ll learn something about your process!
Today would be a great day to practice engaging with other writers by sharing the story you wrote, here in the comments, even if you’re not thrilled wiht it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how people respond.
Will you share your story today?
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!
Write a human-experience short story about a homeless person during the Covid-19 outbreak.
The Author
JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times best-selling and five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author, anthology editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator, and writing teacher/lecturer. He is the creator of V-Wars and the Joe Ledger series.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Matty Dalrymple writes, podcasts, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author™, and is a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. You can connect with The Indy Author™ via Facebook and Twitter.
Matty is also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers Rock Paper Scissors, Snakes and Ladders, and The Iron Ring; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels The Sense of Death and The Sense of Reckoning; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, including Close These Eyes and Write in Water, and the new writing handbook, Taking the Short Tack: Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction which she co-authored with Mark Leslie Lefebvre.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Make list of 10 things that you noticed about your day already.
Even if you woke up at 4 am there are certainly things you noticed.
Try to be as precise and sensory as possible and try to avoid metaphor.
And then, at the end, connect those pieces together to make a story.
The Author
Tammy Breitweiser is a writer and teacher who is a force of nature, an accidental inspirationalist, the keeper of the little red doors, and a conjurer of everyday magic who is always busy writing short stories. Her flash fiction has been published in The Ninja Writers Monthly, Spelk, Clover and White, and Elephants Never. Her essay is in the I Wrote it Anyway anthology. You can connect with Tammy through Twitter @TLBREIT or through her medium page. Sign up for her newsletter here.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!
“I weighed this against the odds that I was doing something incredibly stupid, and I went ahead anyway.”
The Author
Fleet Sparrow writes queer fan fiction, queer flash fiction, and queer novels. Generally, things are pretty odd in Fleet’s world.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!
Opening Line: “She met her true love in the middle of a field of tombstones.”
Michele says: I love cemeteries. They have so many stories, so many characters. I find them comforting.
So it does not have to be a scary story, although it can be. It could be the story of people who are interred there.
Their pre life doesn’t have to have a connection to the cemetery. That could just be the starting point.
It could be people who meet there because they are mourning the loss of someone.
Could be your traditional zombie story, horror story mystery story as well.
But I’m just drawn to the idea of cemeteries as places for stories.
The Author
Michele E. Reisinger studied English and Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University and received an MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware. She lives near Philadelphia with her family and teaches senior and AP English at a New Jersey high school. Her short fiction has appeared online at Light and Dark Magazine, Prometheus Dreaming, 34th Parallel, and is forthcoming in The Mighty Line. “Ask and Ye Shall Receive” was a merit winner for Passion and featured in TulipTree Publishing’s 2019 anthology Stories That Need to be Told. You can find out more at her website: https://mereisinger.com/
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you got on and how you’re celebrating!
Write outside your comfort zone with a random genre, weather type, and errand. (see below)
When you are stuck for new ideas, working from specific suggestions can open up new possibilities. They can also take you out of your normal way of working and help you explore different approaches. You never know what sort of story will result.
Then, write a story in your genre, with the particular type of weather and errand.
(Bonus: choose a favourite childhood character as your main character.)
Genre
mystery
romance
fantasy
political satire
science fiction
thriller
Weather
snowstorm
light rain
heat wave
extreme cold
strong wind
sunny and warm
Errand
buy groceries
return library books
make a bank deposit
pick up a child from an extracurricular activity
deliver a birthday present
renew a piece of government identification
The Author
Monique Cuillerier lives in Ottawa, where she writes fiction, long and short, when she is not procrastinating on Twitter at @MoniqueAC or sporadically posting at notwhereilive.ca. You can read one of Monique’s stories in the anthology Bikes, Not Rockets
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Leave a comment and let us know how you got on and how you’re celebrating!
Welcome to Week 4 of StoryADay! Can you believe you’ve made it this far?
I can tell you from past experience that if you have made it this far, you’re going all the way!
You’ve already spent Week 1 on the “Write” part of the WRITER Code, and Week 2 on “Refine”, concentrating on what was working and what you could let go of in yoru writing and your writing practice.
Last week was all about “Improve”, as you tackled different parts of the story writing craft.
This week’s theme is: “Triumph!”.
This week I want you to make a conscious effort to put a tiny celebration in place whenever you do something that furthers your journey as an author.
Got to your desk? Punch the air and say “yeah!”.
Finished your story? Give yourself a gold star (literally! Put one in your journal!).
Read the prompt and spent the day noodling on story ideas? Take one hand and pat yourself on the back with it.
Didn’t get your story written and decided to let it go, but come back tomorrow? Do a little dance, celebrating your ability to overcome disappointments.
There is some serious behavioral science research behind these silly tactics.
When you celebrate, you feel good, and when you feel good, you want to do more of the thing that makes you feel good.
That’s why some of the things we’ll never be, at StoryADay, are somber, judgmental or unrealistic about the challenges of living this writing life!
The Prompt
Be playful.
Playfulness can open up an expanse in confinement.
So… write a story in 26 sentences, with each sentence beginning with a sequential letter of the alphabet, starting with “A.”
The Author
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published a collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. He’s also the co-host of the podcast Write-minded. His next collection of short stories, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in July 2021.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
